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Setting Up The Greenpeace Ship w/WiFi
An anonymous reader writes "If you're on any wifi related mailing lists, you've probably heard of Nigel Ballard of joejava.com, Minister of Propaganda for the Personal Telco Project in Portland Oregon.
The Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise came into Portland and wanted some an alternative to Inmarsat for their Internet access.
Nigel set Greenpeace up with equipment and got VeriLAN to provide access."
These are the same folks that like to release (um, set free) non-native mink into the natural environment causing devestation of the local animal population, right?
Greenpeace may cause some good, but I think they are terribly misguided at other things. I predict we'll hear a new phrase coming out of the Bush administration (if they survive the election): Eco-terrorists. Storming ships, and other acts (some of which are destructive) don't seem to be acceptable tactics to me.
Posted anonymously since my karma is more important than the air I breath. (or not)
Greenpeace has a bad history of brushes with or outright supporting ecoterrorism. Why does this make the front page when other articles with similiar projects have been done elsewhere?
/Environmentalist sick of ecoterrorists and extemists making the environmental movement look bad.
Their are many other upright environmental organizations that have worldwide work in very challenging locales, so why approve a greenpeace story?
Many of these conditions are very challenging environments that could be teach someone a great deal. Why choose a group that rightly shouln't be called a charity in the first place.
They are against waste and extravagance. They aren't against technology or using energy.
They are against using fossil fuels to the point where it can cause environmental impact, that's why they support alternative energy sources.
Of course, waste and extravagance are subjective measures.
For instance, in 1997 Greenpeace circumnavigated James Ross Island in the Antarctic to highlight the problems caused by global warming (the island was previously attached to the mainland by a portion of the Ross Ice Shelf).
The vessel they used was the Actic Sunrise:
Gross tonnage: 949 tonnes
Length O.A: 49.62 m
Breadth: 11.50 m
Maximum Draught: 5.30 m
Maximum Speed: 13 Knots
This makes a your local radio station's publicity mongering H2 look like a matchbox car. But no, it was necessary. A satellite image of a big stretch of blue where none exited before just doesn't compare to the publicity generated by joyriding all the way to Antarctica in a 150 ft private yacht.
Hypocrites.
Yes terrorists.
I met Greenpeace folks in Portland that were proud to 'know' people who disabled brakes on logging trucks to scare/injure/kill the drivers.
I met Greenpeace folks who told me what they do is not breaking the law because, "We're right and the government is wrong, so the law shouldn't apply to us."
Greenpeace, on their site, has a story about "peaceful protestors" who are being denied (according to Greenpeace) the right to protest peacefully because they are being charged with trumped up charges. Never mind that they broke in to an energy plant (coal), climed a smokestack, and affixed a banner to it. Seems to me they broke several laws there . . . oh, my bad -- laws don't apply to them.
I hope the pub from this WiFi helps others to go to their website (as I did upon reading it) so they can see how Greenpeace really is. Some may agree, some may reach my conclusion -- that they are terrorists . . . But that's the beauty of the web . . . and a little thing called free speech.
-[joke removed for your safety]-
Seems like setting up internet service just for two days seems silly.
RTFA. It's not just for two days, it's for whenever they're in an area with WiFi available.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
So is their only option to completely remove themselves from society in order to prove their point? Everyone would just ignore them. It is necessary for organizations such as theirs to accept some amount of hypocrisy in order to exist at all.
It's sort of like how vegans can live with eating food which comes from fields which when harvested result in the deaths of thousands of rodents. It would be nearly impossible to exist without contributing to animal suffering in some form, but they what they can to reduce such suffering.
At least they are doing *something*, which is a lot better than sitting at home in front of your computer complaining about minor hypocricies in the grand scheme of things of which they are are trying to acheive.
What?
Not to defend Greenpeace (I don't particularly like them), but the first article there made me chuckle a bit. Japan is one of the few countries operating a whaling business "legally" under the guise of the "research" quoted above. I'm sure that their findings are cutting-edge, nobel-prize worthy and the like, but they take a very small "sample" of the whale, then return the carcass to the mainland where it ends up in restaurants. I don't know why the Japanese government even puts up the pretense. They just like the taste of whale meat (it is pretty good...) Because the rest of the world criticizes this habit, the whaler^H^H^H^H^H^Hresearchers get really defensive about their bus^H^H^Hresearch, and issue statements like the one above, reminding the world of how benevolent they are.